


Near Centaurus

by sarensen



Series: To the cold and the nebulous [4]
Category: Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: Canon-Compliant, Classic Kylux, Dysfunctional Relationship, M/M, exploration of the origins of their tlj dynamic, post-TFA, starkiller base fallout, there is not a single gentle thing left in either of them, they are horribly co-dependant in the most destructive of ways, writing this felt like rubbing my face in crushed glass
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-16
Updated: 2018-02-16
Packaged: 2019-03-19 08:10:41
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,145
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13700421
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sarensen/pseuds/sarensen
Summary: Later, he wakes to find them melted into a copper-black seam, clinging with a gentle kind of violence to whatever is left of who they each so badly wanted to be.





	Near Centaurus

He wakes, half-healed and aching, in Hux's bed. The world around him moves in slowed-down stop-motion; snapshots of black sheets, white bloody bandages, gridded air vents. He isn't sure how he got here, where he is, _when_ he is, but he knows it's Hux's bed because it smells like Hux, feels like Hux. The Force drips like sticky globs of bacta through his grasp: they've given him something for the pain, and it's in his veins and in his heavy fingers and covers every synapse in his brain.

When his remaining eye adjusts to the light, he finds Hux sitting at a small desk on the other side of the room, red-rimmed glare fixed on a holoprojection of the sun that used to be Starkiller Base. His back is ramrod straight, palms flattened on the table. (Kylo has never seen him slump with so much as a sigh, as if nothing could bend him. Not even this. Not until he breaks. He thinks that might be soon).

Kylo isn't sure these are Hux's quarters. He isn't sure this is the _Finalizer_. He isn't even entirely sure who's mind he's in. The world smears blackgreysilver when he turns his head, flat and disorientating, and he's so tired, so, so tired

or

maybe it's Hux who's tired, exhausted, uniform wrinkled and body aching and the backs of his eyes heavy with wakefulness.

Kylo tries to say something. Tries to ask where they are. When they are. Asks for water. Hux doesn't even seem to notice him. It's not until Kylo says his name that one gloved fist clenches and he turns a glare on him cold enough to burn like ice.

Kylo swallows, jaw working.

Hux says, "You're awake." He's vitriolic, disappointed, lips curving down over the words. His hatred seethes through even Kylo's tenuous grasp on the Force, bright and clear and scalding. It echoes with the unsaid: _this is your fault_ and _look at what you've done_.

And maybe it's Hux talking, or maybe it's him. He isn't entirely sure. Possibly, he's pushing the words straight into Hux's head. Possibly, the words belonged to Hux all along.

Words like, "You lost control of the situation."

And, "You didn't know what was happening."

And, "You were afraid."

And he's not sure which of them he means.

He isn't sure whether he's thinking it, or Hux is, when he says, "Everything you are, everything you've fought so hard to be, it all meant nothing, in the end. The planet shook itself apart right beneath your feet and you couldn't stop it. And now you're left with nothing. Empty hands. Bleeding."

From the other side of the room, Hux's voice says, "Stop."

Kylo doesn't. He thinks - or maybe Hux thinks - "You failed. You're nothing. All of your power, and you could do nothing."

And Hux's face twists and he's standing beside Kylo now and his mouth is moving, " _Stop._ "

Kylo struggles to sit up, surging against the sheets that wrap like shackles around his thighs. He's screaming, "Disappointment!" and, tears spilling, "Supreme Leader never should have trusted you! You failed him, like you've failed everyone else!" and he's relatively sure he only means himself now, but it's too late --

leather on skin, a sharp crack

\-- and the pain hits him, hard enough to tear the skin on his lip, hard enough to leave a bruise on the back of Hux's fingers tomorrow. Blood splatters onto the sheets, the wound on his face split open under the weight of Hux's wrath.

Kylo's head slumps backward. The ceiling is the upside-down surface of a slowly-churning sea. His ears ring. Copper swirls through streaks of black in the corner of his good eye as Hux runs a hand through his hair, breathing hard.

And Kylo thinks he understands, now. He says, vaguely in Hux's direction but mostly at himself, "Ah. You've come apart, too. Just like the base."

Hux says, "Get dressed. Supreme Leader Snoke wants an audience." and leaves, footsteps dull on the carpet like the last echoes of thunder after a storm.

Kylo sighs out a deep breath through his nose, loud in the sudden silence smeared through with the deep hum of the ship's engines. His ears ring.

Hux is gone.

 

\--------

 

They stand before the Supreme Leader and Hux hurls blame at him like stones. His words land heavy and hurtful, etching deep and irreparable scars on his trust.

"Ren abandoned his post."

"His actions directly resulted in massive loss of life."

"He risked himself and everyone on Starkiller Base to further his own agenda."

In the silence that follows, Snoke turns his cold and crooked gaze on Kylo, and asks if he has anything to say for himself.

Kylo doesn't.

Dismissed, ( _discarded_ ), Kylo follows Hux through the halls of the Supremacy, trailing in the wake of his silence, a shadow of antipathy.

And back in Hux's temporary quarters, Kylo overturns the desk and smashes the chair to pieces against the wall, and rages, and rages, and Hux stands in the eye of the storm, hands clasped behind his straight back, a quiet and unmoving watcher.

And when Kylo eventually smolders down to being capable of words, he rounds on Hux and roars,"you threw me under the speeder like I was nothing!" and "you had no right!"

"Right?" Hux repeats, eyes narrowing. "What _right_ do you think I have to _any_ of this? What right do I have to bring entire planets to ruin? What right do I have to sleep at night, to be at peace ever again in this life or the next? You think I have the _right_ to these stripes?"

He lifts his arm sharply, wrist hovering just below Kylo's line of sight.

"I took them, Ren. I bled and I broke and I remade myself more times than I can count, and eventually, what was left of me crawled out of the ruins of my legacy and _took_ this. Power. Control."

Kylo’s face twists at the word, ‘control'.

Hux hisses, "Bastard son of a kitchen maid and a disgraced Commandant. I don't have any right to be here, and yet here I am. I held everything in my hands, Ren. The Galaxy was mine. And you took that from me. You took _everything_ from me. _You_ are the one who has no right."

He's breathing hard, fists clenched at his sides, posture intense. His skin is so pale, translucent white, a thin veneer over the hatred like ice crusting the fine blue veins on the insides of his wrists and the hollow of his neck and gentle dip of each temple, stark in the sharp light. His eyes are swollen with exhaustion and heartache, dark-ringed and shining.

Kylo surges forward and kisses him, hard.

And gets violently shoved away.

Surprise knocks him off his feet. He stumbles back, loses his balance, falls.

Hux looks down at him with his lip curled in disgust and his brows drawn. Kylo frowns up at him, resentful.

And then Hux smiles, slowly. It cuts straight through Kylo, and all his love bleeds out. Hux kneels before him and scoops his face between his hands. He runs the seams of his thumbs across Kylo's eyes. He pushes his palms over his cheeks and into his hair.

He says, "Oh, Kylo.", softly and with a kind of cruel pity, fingers taloning. His grip tightens, tightens, strands of black snapping loose and curling around the leather of his gloves.

Voice low and filled with contempt, he says, "After all this. You still think I could love you."

He says, "Pathetic."

And gets up, and turns to leave --

\-- and stops, shaking, gasping for breath. Kylo gets slowly to his feet, hand outstretched, the Force curling around Hux's throat like silk, like death. He walks around him, stops in front of him, and doesn't have to say "I could kill you right now."

Hux's mouth works. Gloved fingers scrabble helplessly at his throat. His face crumples into desperation and hatred and between mangled breaths he manages to snarl, "You think you can _break_ me?"

Kylo bares his teeth, curls his fingers, tightens his grip.

Hux gasps, "People far more terrible than you have failed. In what galaxy could _you_ ever be the worst thing that's happened to me?"

Control slips through the cracks between Kylo's fingers, like smoke curling into the ether. Desperate: "I will make you bow before me one day."

Hux spits, "I would rather die."

And for a brief moment, Kylo wants this, wants it with a strong and unshakable and burning desire he has no hope to curb. He growls, and flings his arm to the side, and Hux collides violently with the wall, and crumples to the floor, and is still.

Shock drains the strength from Kylo's legs. He sinks to his knees, horrified, watching the pile of wrinkled black tremble, and uncurl, and breath by deep, gasping breath, become a pale echo of what Hux used to be.

Hux puts himself together piece by piece, and gets up, and goes away.

Kylo lies on the floor of his quarters, shaking and empty.

Hux is gone.

 

\--------

 

Hux comes back. He always does.

In silence, they undress, strip down layer after layer until barbs and sharp things and distance are the only things between them.

Kylo counts the green-purple bruises on Hux's side and the fractures in his broken ribs and presses kisses to the black-red swelling underneath his left eye.

And they fuck, and they finish, and they lie untouching in the narrow bunk, utterly consumed by each other, utterly hollow, and utterly lonely.

Kylo strokes his hand absently over Hux's arm, watching the skin pebble under his palm, tiny hairs rising to meet his touch, and when he pushes hard enough with the Force, eventually, Hux allows it.

And they never say a word, and in the quiet Hux smokes, and Kylo lays his head on his bare chest with his ruined cheek turned up, and Hux strokes his hair softly, and Kylo falls asleep.

 

\--------

 

Later, he wakes to find them melted into a copper-black seam, clinging with a gentle kind of violence to whatever is left of who they each so badly wanted to be.

He huddles with his face hidden against Hux's chest and his fingers dug in under sharp shoulder blades. Hux has scooped as much of him as will fit against his hip, curved over him almost protectively, with his hand and his nose both buried in Kylo's hair.

Kylo can feel the exact moment Hux wakes against him - his body tenses, fingers tightening minutely into his hair. Kylo shrinks into him, _not yet, don't let me go yet, don't go yet_.

Hux whispers into the space where his soft breaths stir the gentle curl of Kylo's hair, "Why?"

And because it's quiet and it's dark and because he's lost everything else except this one honest moment, Kylo says, "All I have left is what you still see in me."

He lifts his head, stares at Hux with his ruined eye, unsure. And when he leans up to kiss him again, a soft kiss, this time, filled with doubt and quiet things, the void inside him pouring out between his lips, Hux allows it for one sweet and shining Force-less moment before Kylo pulls away again, uncertainly, dropping his gaze to where strands of copper brush the pale white skin of Hux's shoulder, dusted with freckles like gold specks on marble. 

Hux puts his hand on Kylo's face, tilting it up toward him. His fingers tighten, leave white-red claw marks on his cheek but Kylo doesn't care, doesn't even feel it because now it's Hux who is kissing him, crushing him to his chest and kissing him so hard, so desperately.

What they have is fragile and razor-edged and dangerous. It's damaged and only roughly sewn together in all the wrong places, like they are. Kylo trespasses into the most intimate places of Hux, too deeply and too irrevocably and with a depth of devotion he knows scares him, and finds in him the shifting colors of nebulae, green and red and the black of dark matter consuming light, consuming air, consuming everything he is and ever wants to be.

And Hux, so easily bruised, digs his blackened fingers into all of Kylo's fractured places and pulls, and _pulls_ , and rends him apart until he is nothing but a collection of shards for Hux to build a palace of. 

And here in the dark with Hux, Kylo still feels the pull to the Light, the heartsick of home, but it's cold and passionless now, an empty hollowness permanently in the back of his chest rather than the burning and aching need it had been once before.

Outside the viewport, the stars stream past, distant and cold.

Tomorrow, they will start again.

**Author's Note:**

> I commissioned my fave [rumsama](https://rumsama.tumblr.com/) to draw the moment Hux tells Kylo “Pathetic”.
> 
>  
> 
>  
> 
> I am on tumblr [here](https://sarensen.tumblr.com/), come say hi!


End file.
